The creative process owes a big debt to my trusty 17-inch 2011 MacBook (modeled at Brecia in TJ). Model discontinued in 2014, fully refurbished by Apple in 2016, this is truly the Millennium Falcon of laptops. Valued more the worse the Internet signal becomes, counterintuitively.

I began this blog two years ago (+10 days) with no clear idea of where it would lead. Arisugawa Park manuscript nearing completion and this agent I had somehow picked up (for reasons unclear to me to this day) preparing to shop the novel.

Well, several strike outs and flirtations with poverty down the road, realizing that very few people are there for you when it counts––in ways that enable personal evolution, jobs outside parcel wrapping, fact checking––I am still kicking as a cloud novelist. We are up to Chapter 2 in Arisugawa Park the Cloud Novel and hallelujah for that.

My grammar is there, my imagination is intact, I have a day job writing that basically covers the bills and allows me to travel in less expensive locales––there is no reason to reason to force my art in any direction it does not want to go.

The further I get from the tone-deaf bifurcations of American politics, the closer I feel I am to the source. I cannot be fairly accused of appropriation because (like the best) I am an equal opportunity thief. What I do does not (by definition?) make money––thanks Bob Dylan, Mark Twain, and too many others to count for setting up the muse as a fool's quest toward a horizon with no end. Thanks for the memories and the destinations to come.

Currently in Baja, envisioning Fabric Dos, getting a couple musicians interested (harder here because people are in cars, have more regimented jobs). Harder also because now is the time of maximum friction. 20 percent import tariff from the Trumpeter to build a border wall? Unilateralist bullshit.

Then again, this makes it all easier in a way... Fabric Dos almost writes itself. Something must be said, dreamt, sung, or written about here. The border is such an arbitrary concept––which the profit-focused elite take full advantage of to corrupt places, diminish fabric.

At the time when my grandfather was growing up in South Dakota, he was surrounded by people who bore more resemblance to Northern Mexican Indios than Eastern European supermodels of our current first family. He communicated in his way, though given the intense pressures of Dust Bowl locust plagues, there was barely room for survival. That culture, whether in Mexico or the United States, is what still exists and what some huckster, joker, tacky real estate meister is trying to destroy. Hence the song title "Separate My Soul."

In honor of the second year anniversary of endurancewriter a photo from the first post. Via Amtrak all night from Raleigh to Miami. Coffee on the house from a conductor-cum-philospher, my first concrete inkling that this reality-denial thing was percolating among the masses.